Friday, December 23, 2011

Lincoln and the Constitution: The Traveling Exhibit

The National Constitution Center's traveling exhibit, "Lincoln: The Constitution and the Civil War," has reached the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law. Thanks to the CMCL Library, you can view the curator's introduction, here. As the CMCL librarians explain, the exhibit is

an examination of how President Lincoln used the Constitution to confront three intertwined crises of the Civil War - the secession of Southern states, slavery, and wartime civil liberties. The materials highlighted in this guide offer opportunities to further explore the exhibition's themes and assess how Lincoln’s struggles still resonate with constitutional issues today.

Cleveland-Marshall will celebrate the opening of the exhibit with three lectures by CMCL professors on Thursday, January 19, from 4:00 to 6:30, delivered in the school's moot court room. David Forte will present a talk on how the Civil War experiences of two soldiers, Albion W. Tourgee, and John Marshall Harlan, affected their attitudes toward segregation in their post war legal careers and jurisprudence. Dennis Keating, who holds a joint appointment with CMCL and the the Levin College of Urban Studies, will examine Lincoln’s suspension of the writ of habeas corpus in the interest of national security. In "Black and White and Re(a)d All Over: The Role of Early Cherokee Newspapers in Promoting the Cherokee Practice of Black Slavery,” Professor Lolita Buckner Inniss will trace “the history of African-ancestored slavery among the Cherokee and the way it was promoted in early Cherokee newspapers, especially in the period leading up to the war, and examines slavery practices under the Cherokee constitution versus the U.S. constitution.”